Tools

#BePresent: Sprout Social Introduces Free Brand Engagement Reports

It’s a basic concept, but it’s critical: You have to be present on social media, because consumers are already there talking about your brand. To help you stay on top of it, Sprout Social launched a new tool today that you can use to better measure and improve social media engagement. Our engagement report is open to all brands and marketers who want to use it, and it’s free. To generate and download your report, head to mustbepresent.com.

The engagement report uses proprietary models to identify messages likely needing a response and measures your brand’s responsiveness to those inquiries. It also helps find opportunities to better manage workflow, allocate resources, and improve engagement. Each report provides a number of relevant statistics including response rate, average response time, and benchmarks from your industry and peer group.

Once you have your report, our system will monitor activity in real-time so you can check back as often as you want to update your report, or to look at the Sprout Social platform for more in-depth reporting. Then, take part in the worldwide discussion on Twitter about strategies for being present on social channels to engage with customers using the #BePresent hashtag.

Our CEO Justyn Howard had this to say:

“Social media has forever changed the way brands interact with customers and it is not enough to simply push messages out into the world. You have to engage, you have to foster dialogues, and you have to provide exemplary social care. In short, you must #BePresent. Brands, and the industry as a whole, traditionally struggle to accurately measure social responsiveness. As an industry leader, it is our responsibility to advance the social measurement conversation and bring new capabilities to market.”

It’s also important to note the Engagement Report doesn’t give you a simplistic score or focus on only one metric. “To singularly define one metric or create an ‘end-all-be-all’ score somewhat defeats the purpose of holistic and ongoing engagement,” Howard says. “We want brands to know where they currently stand, set goals appropriate for their business, implement a strategy to improve and then continually track progress.”

We’re also launching a new suite of features in our social media management (SMM) platform. If you’re a customer, you’ll benefit from detailed engagement reporting, additional analytics over time, and multi-profile summation of data and responses. Engagement metrics and indicators will be present throughout the platform to keep your team apprised of its performance in real-time. Here’s a look. Give it a shot and share what you learn!

Samuel Axon: Samuel is the Editorial Director supervising Sprout Social's editorial and web content projects. He has years of experience in blogging and social media, having previously worked as an editor at social media and technology news sites Mashable and Engadget. He also helped build the white label web content management system Crowd Fusion from the ground up.